So a friend of mine asked me an interesting question to other day. They wanted to know why all of my WordPress plugins are free when I could be selling them, or at least selling a “pro” version of them. There are actually a few reasons for this.

I like Xampp. It sets up a full Apache/MySQL/PHP development environment with very little hassle, which means it’s installed on just about every computer I use on a regular basis. I recently had a need to look into Ruby on Rails (specifically so that I could use the Redmine project management web app) and figured it would be easy to integrate it into my existing dev environment. It kind of… wasn’t.

A lot of times, I need to remove the background from an image in Photoshop as part of a layout. Until recently, I was using Photoshop’s magic wand tool, which, as I’m sure anyone who’s familiar with Photoshop is aware, is kind of hit or miss. Sometimes the result looks great… other times you end up with jagged edges or halos around the image. As it turns out there’s a much cleaner (though more complex) way of doing this.

It’s been almost exactly one year since I cancelled my subscription to cable TV. It’s taken some experimentation, but at this point, I can honestly say that I don’t miss cable. At all. It has definitely been an interesting transition, with some pretty great benefits (not the least of which is the fact that I’m no longer paying Comcast a ton of money).

Some of you may be wondering how I spend my free time when I’m not designing websites or writing Wordpress plugins. Generally, the answer is “really geeky things”. This past weekend, for instance, I set up a media server on my home network that can stream to the Roku set-top-boxes on my living room and bedroom TVs.

Radio Station is a plugin to run a radio station’s website. It’s functionality is based on Drupal 6’s Station plugin, reworked for use in Wordpress. The plugin includes the ability to associate users with “shows”, display the currently on-air DJ, store playlists, and more.

Some of you might have noticed that I jumped on that cable cutters train a while back. I have to say (other than occasionally missing Cartoon Network) I have no regrets about doing so. You might also remember that I purchased a couple of Roku set-top boxes to make up for the lack of cabley goodness in my home.

For the past week, one of the websites I manage has been running a “12 days of Christmas sale”. Rather than creating a new article for each day, they’re updating a single article every day with a new deal. Each new deal has it’s own cute little image next to it.